THE PREMISE OF THE book is so strong. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I had come up with this idea.’”
When M Night Shyamalan talks about his film Knock At The Cabin, he makes the project sound like a perfect confluence of events. He was first asked to produce an adaptation of the source novel, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin At The End Of The World, but ended up being so taken with the concept and Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman’s draft screenplay that he found himself taking on the director’s reins and re-developing it as a passion project.
“It was like a lightning bolt – love at first sight,” he says enthusiastically. “I read the book and it was the same thing again. It speaks to all the things that ignite me: the moral dilemma with a kind of larger philosophical thing at work, heart-pounding stakes throughout, and then the family at the centre. I thought, ‘Actually, maybe I could do it myself.’ And so that’s how we got here. It was very beautiful and organic.”
Tremblay’s novel tells the story of a picture-perfect modern family – two husbands and their young adopted daughter – taking a holiday to a remote woodland cabin. Their happy stay is disturbed by the arrival of a group of threatening
